Miniblog!
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| '_ ` _ \| | '_ \| | '_ \| |/ _ \ / _` |
| | | | | | | | | | | |_) | | (_) | (_| | for stuff that I don't
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I decided to have a miniblog where I throw some words onto the page. Contrast my main blog, which I use for big feature entires that I want to highlight. Entries there might not be much longer than here, but they have more of a place of prominence and are immediately placed into the feed, unlike here.
I may consider upgrade miniblog entries to real blog ones if I think I have a lot more to say; in that case, I will add a link to the main blog page from the miniblog entry.
Newer entries are higher. Just like the main blog page, if there are too many entries, I'll make a miniblog2.html, miniblog3.html, etc, and I'll mention that on the feed.
Miniblog entries aren't immediately placed into the feed; they get put in a digest feed entry whenever enough pile up. There is a colored horizontal line indicating which entires are above where the feed has been updated.
I've been adding logos to each section on the main index page!
Graphic design is not actually my passion so the buttons are just whatever the hell I felt like doing in that moment. I'm just a moron who has simply spent something like 15, maybe 16+ years using GIMP... which I suspect is my penance for something.
Added a few things to the previously neglected articles and pages section of my links page. I need to do more proper web surfing again so I can add more stuff...
Had to add <wbr> tags to the quicknav here, since it otherwise spills horribly outside the border in Chrome. For whatever reason, the text wraps as-is in Firefox, but not under Chrome. I have no idea why, and I can't find any good explanation as to how Chrome decides when to wrap.
Naturally, when I added it, I did all my testing under Firefox, but I opened it up on a machine with Chrome and wondered how I managed to fuck up that badly. More confusingly, the quicknav on the main page does not spill outside in Chrome, even when the window is resized to be very small.
On an unrelated note, I kind of want to mess with Toki ne Pona, my "straightforward" and transparent set of modifications to Toki Pona that were intended to increase clarity.
99% of the stuff I find myself having issues with in Toki Pona aren't addressed, nor would they be addressable in a way that can be stripped out. I don't know what I'd do, really. The actual clunkiest thing I've seen in Toki Pona that I regularly deal with are statements like "mi wile lape tan ni: tenpo suno ni la mi pali mute", where "ni:" used to join the second sentence onto the first feels like a trainwreck every time I see it or say it, and I'd really like to figure out a good way to fix that.
I've been marking links that are R-15 and R-18 with a different mouse-hover color. Not every link on the site has been changed, and there are site sections where I mention all external links on a page may be R-18 without warning (and thus, they don't have warnings), but I'm working on it.
For reference, here is a sample normal link, and here is a sample warning link.
Added two songs to the music page. I really do need to get back into the habit of making music...
On a slightly annoying note, uploading to Catbox had issues. pomf.lain.la thankfully worked.
I finished re-reading Harry Is A Dragon And That's Okay. It's great. Seriously, what a fun story that absolutely celebrates all the cool shit in Harry Potter that never got expanded on properly in the books. As usual, there is an almost painful lack of any serious conflict, even in cases where there really should be, but the story's strengths lie heavily in just how it makes the Wizarding World so lively and... well, magical.
As entertaining as the main Harry Potter books are, I've always felt that they don't do an amazing job of the setting feeling properly magical, and everything seems almost bafflingly backwards... which is probably deliberate since the setting is bascially dominated by blood supremacists and those who replaced their logic with magic, but occasionally you get some really interesting descriptions of things in the main HP books that don't fit with that at all. This story absolutely runs with everything interesting from the books and just keeps going.
I am also re-reading Legendarily Popular, and it's definitely better than Ashes of the Past so far. Similar tone (with less actual peril) and power level (this Ash could probably evenly match AOTP Ash, which is pretty impressive since AOTP Ash is effectively several years more experienced), but a bit more cohesive, and fights don't run on way too long. I do miss seeing Jessie, James, and Meowth actually doing stuff. They aren't completely sidelined, but they get vastly less focus here thna in Ashes of the Past.
Fired up Beatoraja and pulled out my janky IIDX controller (remember, to support 2P side play, it has a button to the top-left of key 1; it'd be in a spot that any IIDX player would refer to as "key 0"). My skills haven't disappeared into the abyss! My timing is definitely a bit worse at the moment (this could just be a day-to-day variation thing; that's just how playing IIDX is), but my ability to read notes seems to have become a bit better somehow and I was able to clear a few songs that I hadn't before.
I should fire up Pop'n Music again. I constantly wish there was a proper Pop'n cab near me. Near as in, less than an hour away (and my nearest is worse than that). Going to my usual arcade haunts is a hassle, let alone driving waaaay out of the way for one game.
In other news, I've been playing too much Pokemon TCG Pocket. I should probably stop. I'm not dumb enough to spend money on it, at least (and neither should you; mobage is a sin).
I'm coming up to the point where I'm considering if I should split this page off, it's getting long.
I've also continued to add even more buttons to the bottom of the main index page. One day, I'll get bored, but it's not today, and it probably won't be tomorrow either.
As much as I'd like to do my own hosting and have my own domain... well, after seeing the dead sites on the webring, I am reminded that I know this site would probably go down if I was dealing with that myself. I'm cheap and I'm lazy.
I've done a lot of site updates, so remember to clear your cache! I've definitely seen a few pages stubbornly not change after multiple refreshes despite having definitely changed them.
I was also reminded that there is the 
auto-generated Neocities RSS feed for the site, which updates every single time I made an edit to an HTML page. It's vastly less descriptive and useful as a feed to be read, but much more up-to-date when it comes to tracking page updates, even if there is a definite delay.
Adding the 88x31 buttons to the main page has been a lot of fun. A few are my own, a few were scavenged from one of the many 88x31 button repositories, and several of those were edited by me anyway. They do feel a little bit tacky, but fuck it, they're a classic way to have fun expresing yourself on your website, and they're like a whole mile down my extremely long front page, instead of front-and-center when you open it. If it gets too much, I'll move them to a dedicated buttons page.
All my buttons are there because I like them in specific, even if I absolutely think some of them are tacky. I have actively made a decision to not just throw up a few buttons that I was tempted to just for the aesthetic of it, so nothing with software I don't use or sites I don't visit or opinions I don't have, even if I like how the button looks lol. I might end up just editing those buttons to actually fit with what I like in specific, but it would require at least a little bit of effort, and due to my quick-and-easy template, it is often less effort to do something from scratch to represent things I like.
Also, I was very nearly done editing a button (featuring the incredibly cute Zundamon!) and GIMP crashed on me. Fine, that's life, shit happens... except I was reminded that even now, twenty one fucking years later, GIMP still doesn't have autosave, and I'd have to redo the whole thing - this wouldn't really take that long, except it was going to be an animated button. Now GIMP gets a button of shame. This time, I immediately saved a .xcf when I started it, and kept hitting Ctrl+S reflexively.
This isn't the first crash, this won't be the last crash. Again, shit happens. Seriously though, I was going to add a normal "I use GIMP, download it here" button that I found with the other buttons I was adding since despite everything, I do use GIMP as my usual image editor due to a decade and a half of habit, but that would be inflicting pain onto others for no reason.
Reading through the rationale for the feature's non-existence in the bug tracker entry is an easy way to make yourself instantly fucking mad. Just a failure on every single level, but a lot of stuff in GIMP is like that. Go ahead, draw a fucking outlined circle. I'll wait. If your first thought was doing a circle select and using Edit -> Stroke Selection, GIMP will draw a really fucked up looking circle with uneven line thickness. For whatever fucking reason, the correct way is to convert the selection to a path, and then stroke the path. Selecting the border of your previous selection and filling that will also give you a decent outline circle. Using GIMP is like this in many aspects, but I've used it so long that I haven't really sat down to think about how fucked up the whole experience is.
This entry was going to end after the second paragraph, and then my shit disappeared before I got to save it. Worse, I was very close to actually being done and saving it. Give me an option to write whatever the fuck to disk every few minutes so I'm not completely up a creek if shit happens. I've seen the naive behavior described in other programs, where autosaves took several seconds and stopped the world until the save completed (because regular saves did that too), and it was still infinitely better than losing whatever shit I had started working on.
Continuing from my earlier entry on The Protomen, I decided to give Act II: The Father of Death a listen again.
The first album definitely feels like a tighter listen, but Act II is so good anyway that it feels like quibbling over details. The Good Doctor is such a fucking good track, the album starts on a really high note and keeps it up.
I feel like the biggest issue Act II has over the first album is that it absolutely feels a lot more like I'm missing visuals for what's happening. I feel like I need to see what's going on acted out on stage in Act II, while I feel that Act I is a more focused musical album that conveys more of the story in the audio (reading the liner notes is really important in both though since there are details that aren't mentioned in the songs for both albums).
I decided to try and re-read Harry Is A Dragon And That's Okay, and while once again, I am confronted with a lot of places where there absolutely should be conflict but things were smoothed over, the story gushes with trying to bring the reader a sense of wonder and magic (things I can reasonably say that the main HP books have a real tendency to forget about), lots of expanding on the nature of the world, lots of humor based on what Harry has become. It is also incredibly long at 735k words, so if anyone reading this post decides to give it a pass, I will not blame them, although reading all 735k words is like if you sat down and tried to read all of the HP books at once.
On an unrelated note, I've updated the CSS, so clear your cache. In addition, I added a bunch of 88x31 buttons to the bottom of the front page, because why not. It's fun. I probably should make some more that represent shit I like; most of the ones I just found on the net that weren't specifically for a given site just didn't seem useful to anyone in 202X. It's also goofy seeing modern personal sites with ad buttons from 26 years ago to things that don't exist. Making your own buttons for things you like isn't hard, I even have a lazy template in PNG format for beveled buttons. Slide in an image underneath it in your favorite image editor with layers, and that's it.
On another unrelated note, I really should get back to watching Nanoha, but I haven't been watching that much anime at all lately. I need to go watch CITY too, since I was looking forward to it.
I was reading Accidental Apotheosis, another story written by Saphroneth, the author of Ashes of the Past, and I'm probably going to drop it. I made it up to Ash's Sinnoh journey. It's a real shame, because the base premise is interesting, where Ash gets transformed into a Pokemon during a canon episode of the show and it turns out he already was one: Arceus (the son; as far as I know Ash is not in fact the creator of the world there) and continues on his journey, trying to do the best he can while coming to grips with the nature of his power.
It is also dreadfully boring after a point. A lot of conflicts are smoothed over, a lot of exciting moments get skipped over, a lot of boring fights fill whole chapters. The earliest part of the story has a much, much faster pace and much more focus, but by the time of the Battle Frontier arc... the problems that developed just become too much.
Jessie and James discover the truth of what Ash is very early on, and try to help out by interfering in Ash's life with their mechs. Unfortunately, this just doesn't go anywhere, it just ends up being an excuse to gloss over conflicts. Even when Ash finds out that they knew what Ash had become, he makes a decision in anger that he knows is not a good idea, but then never tries to actually find out just what they know (that he might not know), which just doesn't make sense in a story that is all about talking things through and trying to find out more about Ash's new nature as an Arceus.
Even despite the fact that the author's writing style tends towards smoothing over problems and generally reducing conflict (for a particularly exciting and punchy story that still absolutely exemplifies this, read There's No Rule That Says A Wolf Can't Be A Jedi - you will rapidly notice the extreme current of everyone being maybe a bit more reasonable than is natural), there are huge sections of Accidental Apotheosis that just don't do anything. They don't give us a look into the world, they don't give us a look into Ash's new powers, they're not exciting or funny or anything. Events happen, but they don't mean anything and they don't feel like they're building to anything.
I don't expect Accidental Apotheosis to be nearly as exciting of a story as Ashes of the Past, but there shouldn't be multiple chapters in a row where Ash's nature as an Arceus and the fact that he's a Pokemon (let alone a god) just doesn't matter and any place where it could have caused conflict was ignored. I don't want to rag on the story too badly, but I felt like I had to write about the problems.
This miniblog entry isn't very mini, but whatever. It's not a feature article, I won't want to blast everyone's RSS feed with "this story kinda sucks" as a feature post, and that's a much harsher statement than I feel. I'd say "this story falls into a terribly long rut and I don't feel like finishing" is more accurate, anyway.
I haven't played much in terms of games recently. I really need to get back into playing IIDX again. I fired up Project Diva Mega Mix+ a few weeks ago and my skills haven't become that rusty (I can do nearly everything on hard, and I'm slowly struggling my way through extreme), but I want them to get better and I absolutely have not put the time into the game. I know for certain my Sound Voltex skills are in decline, and I need to play a bunch more to get them back up.
Everyone and their dog picked up Umamusume, and I don't hate it, but I don't know how much time I'm going to put into the horse girl game. I got sucked into the Pokemon TCG Pocket game, and while I adamantly refuse to spend money, I have ended up playing an awful lot of it.
I want to do a proper feature blog entry about Mirage Feathers at some point, with pictures. I have not a single clue if or when I will bother to get around to it. Go play the game, it's great. The dev absolutely understands the heart and soul of Space Harrier and After Burner and just all the big-name classic flying rail-shooters.
Updated the fanfiction I like page.
Most notably, I re-read Ashes of the Past, a two million word mega-epic that goes through quite nearly the entirety of the Pokemon anime from the start of Kanto to just about the end of Sinnoh.
I enjoyed it quite a lot, and it definitely was something enjoyable to do in the downtime I had at lunch, or eating, or whenever I was waiting for anything, really. It took me maybe a bit under two months to read through, and I suspect this was quite fast because it is two million words long.
The story has its share of problems, but fuck man, I like Pokemon as a franchise and it's a fun story that is effectively Ash going back in time to do a new game++ run of his adventure up to that point because Team Galactic managed to completely break the universe some time during Ash's adventure in Unova. The story isn't actually finished... but the main plot is resolved by the end.
The story started in 2011, and ended in 2021, which means the Fairy-type didn't exist yet. The beginning was re-written a few years ago to clean things up, but you would be surprised to find out that the Fairy-type still doesn't exist yet at the start of the story. It's pretty neat how that gets resolved, honestly - this becomes a plot point.
Listening to The Protomen (the first album, Act 1) again. Used to blast this a lot more, but it has been a while since I've listened to it. It's so fucking good.
Act 1's super raw sound is killer. Unrest in the House of Light gives me chills every time. Most of the songs get to me, really.
I remember liking Act 1 more than Act 2, but I need to give that album a listen again. 2 is a lot brighter sounding and has some major production quality enhancements (Act 1's lo-fi nature and Act 2's crisp sound are both deliberate), but Act 1 feels so damn raw.
I still wonder if/when Act 3 will come out. Maybe soon, maybe never. At least they're still definitely active.
On an entirely unrelated note, ProDefCh is back! I'm so glad. I hope it gets the traction it used to have... edit: it's dead...
I've been updating the site here and there. I haven't done any feed digests in a while.
Haven't drawn in ages, so I've been doing that again. I've been attempting to write some stories (mostly fanfiction), who knows how far I'll get or if I'll release anything. I've been attempting to make music, and again, who knows if I'll release anything.
I'm stalling out on a lot of shit. I am deeply behind in my Japanese study right now, and have probably lost about two months worth of effort in terms of how much I'm slacking vs how long it has been since I've started my latest attempt to learn the language, but I'm still cracking at it. Some of it is just laziness, but a lot of it is life getting in the way, which sucks ass.
Added niichan to the links page. Neat audioboard. I am surprised the address wasn't already taken. edit: it's dead...
Seeing this site reminded me that I kind of want to run my own BBS site of some description, but I'm cheap and lazy and I'd ideally want to write my own software for it anyway. I have been learning Flask because I'm lazy and it has been stunningly easy so far. I'm not really a web programmer at all. Honestly, I should have done this like 15 years ago when I first heard about Flask.
Gallery updates will now be digests too. Technically, this doesn't change much on your end, since I just upload things en-masse, but this makes life less effort for me, I just upload as much or as little as I feel like, and then shout it out to the world when I feel like.
Main blog entries will now also be full-text in the feed... but I really need to finish a main blog entry. I haven't touched any of the ones I was writing in like a month.
On an unrelated note, I've been trying a lazy-bastard version of the Pomodoro technique for times when there are things I want to do but keep abandoning despite having barely spent any time on it: 15 minutes to do my task, 15 minute breaks, repeat as much as I feel like. Not very efficient, but it's way easier to get myself to finish things (like getting my Anki reviews done before midnight).
Also, it's May 4th, but fuck man, I don't want to think about Star Wars these days. Thinking about it just makes me feel bad. Same thing with the state of Star Trek.
On another unrelated note, after re-reading that story in the previous miniblog post, I'm reminded that I really should go re-watch Nanoha/A's/StrikerS. I might not get through all of it (big parts of StrikerS were a slog, and honestly, big parts of the first season were kinda dull too), but it has been a long time now since I've last gone through any of the seasons. In particular, I'm on the record as having said that Nanoha A's is an actual 10/10, but I want to see if I still think that's the case.
I've updated the fanfiction I like page after quite some time. In particular, I hope you lot check out The Unsuspected Prisoner, a very odd mishmash of Warhammer 40k and Nanoha's setting details into a surprisingly coherent whole. The grim darkness of the far future is behind them, but it's always ready to rear its ugly head.
I probably should do a miniblog digest soon so that people actually see what's up with the site. There aren't a lot of miniblog updates, but they're fairly "un-mini" and are certainly a lot longer than I expected.
The Neocities site editor not having spellcheck is really annoying, but editing pages outside of it is even more annoying...
Minor site updates here and there. In particular, if you haven't checked out the links page in a while, I've added stuff! I've also decided to throw most mentions of site updates that aren't brand new pages here into the miniblog, which means they'll only enter the feed when miniblog digests pile up.
Rotting Angels is going down... RIP. Fun site while it was around. Probably could have downsized a bit to like 5 boards (general, drugs, games, music, oekaki), but just running the site takes its toll, especially with all the nasty spam shit that hits pretty much every small imageboard. World2ch and 711chan are back, hopefully both here to stay. 4chan might be kill, who knows. I left a bit over a year ago and while I miss the fast pace, I don't miss a lot of the site culture being more focused on getting replies and getting angry instead of actually talking about things. It's nice seeing other smaller sites get an uptick in activity while 4chan is down, and I hope at least some of those people stay. I haven't seen much of the shit I left 4chan for show up elsewhere, probably because these are just slower, calmer sites.
Here's a tribute picture I drew to mark its closure, featuring the angel swordsman guy I drew on RA's oekaki board before. I drew it with a mouse and I was going to spend like 1/10th the time I did on it, so it is rough. This one is also not yet in the gallery because I'm too lazy to go update it right now.
On an unrelated note, I really do need to write that main blog article about Namco. Genuinely, I don't know any Namco diehards despite the sheer caliber of the games they make.
Mirage Feathers on Steam kicks ass. I've been having a blast with it. It's basically yuri Space Harrier (okay, the game is more like After Burner in level design and overall presentation). The game is a bit short, although admittedly, I haven't played through it in one sitting since it is very much an arcade game and thus inherently short. It's $5, and I'd say it's worth $5. Cool bosses, cool weapons that unfortunately unlock a bit too slowly, slick graphics (turned off the crappy CRT filter; I'm not even opposed to using one, it's just all the filter options here suck), and Notari, the main character, is super cute.
Speaking of Notari, I drew her! I wish I drew her a bit better, but I already spent way longer on that picture than I wanted, and she's still plenty cute here. You can absolutely tell that I have no skill at mechanical pieces though, her wings look fucked up and I knew that while I was drawing them, but I didn't really know how to fix it.
I haven't done a batch gallery update as of this post, so that pic isn't in the gallery section yet.
I've also been enjoying the absolute hell out of Tetris The Grand Master 4. It's $35, but fuck, this is the game I've been waiting years for and I glady dropped the money. It has a few minor issues, a bunch of them because of dumb shit Tetris Company brand licensing decisions unrelated to Arika, and a few that are because Arika seems to have rushed the game out the door (also seemingly for dumb shit Tetris company brand licensing decisions; fuck the Tetris Guidelines), but it's good shit. Absolutely worth the entry fee. That being said, if you don't know shit about whether you'd even want to play TGM in the first place, let alone drop $35 on it, the easiest way to get a feel for what TGM is even about is to play TGM2 Plus in MAME.
One last thing is I've been playing Teki Paki in MAME, a Sega arcade puzzle game where you connect hexagonal colored tiles. It's fun. A bit easy once you get the hang of it (I continued twice on my last playthrough, and I probably could have 1CC'd it); the key strategy is not to break off as many tiles as you can, but to connect a large blob of the same color, since the opponent's playfield moves down one row for every tile past the fourth that is destroyed. I think you can theoretically destroy ten tiles at once: three groups of 3, and then the final tile connecting them in the middle, which mightn't insta-kill your opponent, but would come very close. It's usually easier by far to just do seven at once: two groups of 3, with the final connecting tile placed between them. I don't know if I'll do a main blog entry on this game, who knows.
I probably should rename this page to be the blog and the main blog to be feature articles, but fuck it. I still need to work on those articles... I also really do need to update the webring. I don't mind being a little behind, but I do want to catch up before it becomes an ordeal.
I'm getting things together. I have another big gallery update on the way (edit: it happened already lol). I did a few site edits like the quicknav bar on the front page and making external links (well, ones with target="_blank" set) display differently. Anyone new in the webring, I added you... kinda. I still need to go back and add banners, but until then, you're in a list at the top of the page. I might throw this into a feed digest after I do that gallery update (also happened already).
Please hard refresh the page in case you don't see any CSS changes.
I haven't updated much in a while because of life and laziness combining into a vicious cycle of not touching this site.
I really should go finish that article I was doing about friction in getting things done, because it sure explains a lot about this whole affair.
I ended up shifting how I studied Japanese to be a little closer to the AJATT method, but my ever decreasing amount of free time has put a nasty knife between the ribs of that idea. I'm still definitely improving, but I'm going nowhere near as fast as I want to. It's a marathon, not a race, and I am acutely reminded that going full AJATT is an impressively easy way to achieve complete burnout if you aren't NEET or something.
Sorry to anyone in the Lainchan webring who hasn't had their site added. I still don't know when I'm going to sit and add you all. There's a lot of shit I think about doing almost every day, and then I don't get around to it lol.
On a closing note, I had been trying to play more games but my terribly reduced free time has fucked that up. In particular, I haven't played remotely as much of Chaos Heat as I've wanted. I had also started going back through the PS2 library again and was having fun, even if a lot of it was just me playing Burnout 3 (2 is arguably better), and PCSX2 is really goddamn good these days. I am too lazy to plug my PS2 back in even though it is in arm's reach of me, so using PCSX2 was really convenient.
My gaming time has been almost all MAME lately. I have some blog entries in the pipeline regarding things I've played, like Taito's Chaos Heat.
In the meantime, check out my MAME favorites list. It is a bit dense and hard to read since it's just a text file, but honestly, I was never getting around to doing all this in HTML format. It will reside on the things I like section of the site.
I still have some updates in the pipeline for the site... that I probably won't get to for a while. Most of my free time continues to be spent on learning Japanese, with me typing this being a quick break.
subs2srs and impd are really useful. I'm probably not using them the intended way - I don't have Japanese subs for a lot of stuff so I ended up throwing a bunch of audio+picture cards with English on the reverse side, and my setup for impd is pretty much just fighting the script the entire time since I want to put the files on my cheapo no-name mp3 player that doesn't support Opus (annoyed the files it generated had a .ogg extension since my player tried to open them and choked horribly as I tried to figure out how to turn the thing off - yes, it's an Ogg container, but fuck off).
I feel like I'm making progress, and I feel like it probably would be sustainable, but the whole AJATT thing sounds like a one-way ticket to burnout and genuinely feels like an aggressively hyper-brute force method taken as gospel, so I'm stuffing myself with as much Japanese as I can tolerate at a given time (lots) and letting myself have down time. The good news is that I am feeling a bit of withdrawal when I do stop, so I do in fact end up getting back to things.
I have a full blogpost on the way for this, I just have no idea whatsoever when I'll get around to editing and posting it. Mata ne!
Last day of the year!
I have a bunch of stuff written and drawn for the site and I probably won't get it uploaded until 2025 since it's like 1am and I really should be sleeping, and I'm gonna be doing shit later today instead of being home, lol. An awful lot of what I've written is stuck on my phone and I'd need to get it off since I wrote it while on break at work, and while adding to the gallery is very simple, it still involves some level of effort. I really should finish that article I was going to write about how any kind of friction gets in the way of even simple tasks... but there's a bit of friction there, lmao. I'll get to it. (´人｀)
I got back into seriously studying Japanese so most of my free time/idle noodling time outside of work has been replaced with Anki study or watching stuff in Japanese. No real loss, a lot of my time was purely wasted on YouTube. Dr. Slump is such a funny show. Hopefully, by New Year's 2027, I can reasonably say I know Japanese, even if only to a fairly basic level.
Thought of the day: big companies can survive stupid mistakes that would instantly destroy smaller organizations. Worse yet, they can thrive while in the midst of completely fucking up.
If someone ever wonders how a small company or an individual can out-do a multi-billion dollar corporation despite all the money the corporation can bring to bear upon a task, the latter is under constraints the former two aren't, while also being in a position where cause and effect for mistakes are too distant to really correlate. There is a reason why big companies find themselves hitting the trust thermocline - everything seems fine and the numbers keep going up, even while they're in the middle of completely fucking up... and then things reach a tipping point where everyone just leaves for someone else, anyone else.
I can't remember where I saw the specific post that had me thinking about this, but I guess the important thing is that I remembered to post about it.
I fucking hate seeing pictures with anti-AI filters used on them. I fully get why they are used, but they give me the same disgust to look at as seeing not-quite-right details in AI generated images.
Updating the site is relaxing. Sometimes it feels like work, but mostly it feels like when I'm posting on a board somewhere, but with much more control and permenance. Honestly, I probably should just replace some of my idle posting on imageboards and similar with site updates.
I am considering the merits of getting a Pi 500 or a used ThinkCentre to replace the Pi 4 sitting next to me. The Pi 500 would be a completely drop-in replacement and would save a fair bit of desk space as an all-in-one thing. The ThinkCentre would be vastly faster, but it isn't like I use the machine for anything intensive, it plays a grid of downloaded videos and music.
Honestly, I probably could just leave things as-is, although having a bit more processing headroom is always handy for cases when I can't actually use my main desktop that is right next to it.
Go Nagai's work is so fucking good... Violence Jack kicks so much ass. The fact that I can't go and buy a copy in English is some serious bullshit, this is one of the best manga I've ever read. I truly believe that Nagai's name belongs up there with Tezuka's.
Also, I have decided to add miniblog entries to the feed, but not immediately.
I'm messing about with a dumb idea with Toki Pona called Toki ne Pona that you can check out here. This is a rough draft.
It is a set of fully optional, fully removable prefix words you can use to make your Toki Pona statements more readable. Text should be convertable directly to grammatical Toki Pona by simply erasing the Toki ne Pona additions - it might not be that readable since it was written with the expectation that certain things were clarified, but it is designed to be both easy to learn and easy to ignore.
I had considered doing an "upgraded" version of the language, but honestly, fighting the tide of existing users and trying to push my changes is not something I feel like doing.
I'll add this to my Toki Pona page at some point (edit: done), and will write a full blog entry too. This would be a full blog entry, but I still need to work on it and make an HTML set of documentation for it.
(November 16th, 2024) - upgraded to a main blog entry.
Getting back into making music. Struggling (as expected), since it has been a long time since I've written anything. Have a listen (.mp3, Catbox) to what I'm doing this immediate second, a Zundamon song written in Toki Pona. It's a bit of a mess right now, hopefully I can clean it up nicely enough. I also hope (assuming I keep the line since it's very cheesy, it's basically "listen, this song can do good to all" semi-literally, it sounds much less dumb in Toki Pona than in English) that I remember to change "kalama musi ni" in "o kute e ni: kalama musi ni li ken pona e jan ali" to "kalama musi mi".
At some point I will add a Toki Pona page to this site. I'd like to think I'm skilled with it, but I don't go to the big Toki Pona Discord since I don't use Discord (among other reasons), so I know I'm not well practiced beyond shouting "ko jaki soweli" (horseshit, dogshit, some kind of animal shit) when I see something dumb at work. I'll probably upgrade this entry when I finish the song.
The Maho Girls Precure sequel is in 2 months! I'm so excited. I should probably re-watch Maho, honestly. If it's anything like the Yes 5 sequel, I probably won't need to rewatch, but I feel like I should.
There's a trailer on YouTube.
I'm still a bit surprised they're even doing a sequel for Maho.
I absolutely feel like I should program more, but I can't be bothered to do it. I really do want to make another game with m(vl)gl in particular. A lot of stuff in modern programming is absolutely a pain, which definitely influenced m(vl)gl's design a lot. I'll probably expand my feelings on this in a full entry, it's like 12:30am and I have a headache, lmao.
I need to practice drawing faces. I'm typing this so I actually remember to do it. A lot of my drawings just have a circle with two lines for eyes because it makes my life a lot easier, and I want to fix that.
Magical Fami is so good... I'm not too far from the end. I'll write a main blog entry when I'm done with it. It's so good...
It does lose some steam around the end in terms of keeping me hooked, but it's still just such a great love letter to the Doremi franchise.
(November 4th, 2024) - upgraded to a main blog entry.
Still reading a bunch of manga. The Mazinger manga was fun (at least, before the Great Mazinger portion). The scans I found were kinda crap and I'm certain there were chapters missing. I'm reading Mitsudomoe, it's really dumb, but kinda funny. Reading Bleach still, and I'm reading Yu Yu Hakusho as well.
I want to read Violence Jack, but apparently there's a big gap in which chapters are translated, unless I can read Italian. I need to go finish Devilman Lady (really, restart it from the top) since it kicks ass. I think I stopped entirely because the tab I was reading it in got closed for whatever reason, lmao.
Manga is great. I feel like anime takes too much of my limited free time to binge on, but I can read a bunch of manga and start and stop whenever. I tried watching anime in that fashion, starting and stopping whenever, but noticed I'd barely finish 2 episodes in a week, so I gave it up.
Still reading Judge Dredd. I'm on the Hell Trekkers storyline, and it kicks ass. I will probably write a full entry later.
It is admittedly a wagon journey west story like you've probably read before, but it has a very cool Judge Dredd universe flair to it due to the madness of the Cursed Earth: towns full of mutants, hordes of dinosaurs, great lakes of lava, radiation storms, the works. Very thrilling storyline.
[edit] Finished it, the ending is kinda lame. Fun ride, though. Probably won't write a full entry for this storyline in particular, I'll probably do one for what I think of where I am in Dredd overall. Just finished the City of the Damned storyline, which was pretty cool if not amazing.
Started my miniblog! Entries will be short, maybe terse, maybe clunky, who knows. Who cares, lol.
I want to play Pop'n Music properly, but I don't have a controller. I use my IIDX controller with its 8 keys. There's a "key 0" to the top-left of key 1 so I can rotate my controller around for P2 side play in IIDX. Scratch is Pop'n key 1, that extra "key 0" is Pop'n key 2, and then IIDX 1-7 are Pop'n 3-9.
Whenever Pop'n key 2 shows up in a song, I start messing up. I am now increasingly aware of how many Pop'n songs seem to focus on keys 3-9 like if they were charted for IIDX, lol.
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You might also want to check out my proper blog, which features somewhat longer (if still not long) articles.